Feature by Pat Broeske

Fifty years after gunshots rang out in Dallas’ Dealey Plaza, the collective memory continues to celebrate the life and achievements of John F. Kennedy, and to ponder his death. Authors and publishers are also remembering the November 22nd anniversary with dozens of new books on Kennedy’s assassination and legacy. We’ve pored through the stacks to point readers toward some of...

Feature by Trisha Ping

Is there anything more nerve-racking than publishing a first novel? For authors and publishers alike, it’s a nail-biting moment of sink or swim. Here are 10 debuts from the year (so far!) that signal the start of promising careers.

Two men on two very different journeys

In Bloody Crimes, James Swanson returns to the historical vicinity of his 2006 bestseller Manhunt. That book offered a gripping, swift-moving account of the pursuit of Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, and his accomplices. Bloody Crimes tells the story of two different journeys that unfolded at nearly the same time as the hunt for Booth.The first journey is the flight of...

Whodunit Column by Bruce Tierney

Stone Heights, Colorado: Jericho Ainsley, onetime director of the CIA, lies dying. He has gathered his relatives, friends, supporters and minions to his side for a final goodbye. At the opening of Jericho’s Fall, Stephen L. Carter’s espionage thriller, Rebecca “Beck” DeForde has been summoned to Jericho’s bedside. Ainsley gave up his family and his CIA career...

Frequent travelers

The photographs in Annie Griffiths Belt's memoir, A Camera, Two Kids and a Camel, are stunning, which is no surprise given her 30 years as a National Geographic photographer. Interspersed among her images - of a farmer struggling against the frigid North Dakota wind, women in Jerusalem worshipping during Ramadan, her own children snuggling with Bedouins - are stories about her life, taking...

Behind the Book by James L. Swanson

<b>Grandmother's gift inspires a lifelong fascination</b> It was my grandmother who first got me interested in assassination. I was born on Lincoln's birthday, February 12. When I was a child, from as far back as I can remember, I received Lincoln books, trinkets, medals and souvenirs as gifts. When I was 10 years old, I discovered the dark side of the Lincoln story. That's when...

The aftermath of a capital crime

Lawyer/historian James L. Swanson is the coauthor of Lincoln's Assassins (2001), an enthusiastically received volume that primarily provided a visual record of the persons, places and events surrounding the April 1865 murder of the president and its aftermath. With Manhunt: The Twelve-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer, Swanson explores in dramatic detail John Wilkes Booth's escape from Ford's...

After finishing Robert L. O'Connell's Fast Eddie: A Novel in Many Voices (Morrow, $24, 0688166903), I turned to the one-volume encyclopedias and historical reference works that fill the bookshelves behind my chair to look up Edward Vernon Rickenbacker (1890-1973), the historical figure who is the novel's title character. It was an education. The books that mentioned Rickenbacker...